Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab) Book Talk: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures
Why has anime, a “low-tech” medium from last century, suddenly become the cultural “new cool” in the information age? In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures, Li shifts the center of global geography of knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia. Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, the book explores the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time. Drawing from film studies, animation studies, media theories, fan studies, and area studies, the book provides broad cultural and theoretical explanations of anime’s appeal to a new body of tech-savvy knowledge workers and consumers commonly known as geeks, otaku, or zhai. Examining the forms, techniques, and aesthetics of anime, as well as the organization, practices, and sensibilities of its fandom, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures is at once a theorization of anime as a media environment as well as a historical and cultural study of transnational geekdom as a knowledge culture. Li analyzes anime culture beyond the national and subcultural frameworks of Japan or Japanese otaku, instead theorizing anime’s transnational, transmedial network as the epitome of the postindustrial knowledge culture of global geekdom.
